A true sound artist, DJ, innovator, and leading figure on the Japanese and global electronic scene, Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound, dedicating himself to ultrasounds and frequencies that are absolutely unusual in everyday perception. All this using to the last possible resource what is today in the potential of processors and technology. Indeed, Ikeda ventures so deeply into the origins of digital sound constructions that he reaches the essential data, the binary codes, the mathematical structures that underlie them and draws from there audio-visual performances and installations intended to represent and describe that invisible veil, that continuous flow of data that permeates and invades the world. There are now numerous places of art and culture in which Ikeda has been able to give life to installations and performances: Salle Olivier Messaien, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, La Villette, Sònar, The Barbican, Architectural Association, Hayward Gallery, Millennium Dome, Queen Elizabeth Hall, ICC. of Tokyo, Göteborg Biennial, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Performance Space in Sydney, Art Beijing, to which were added the recognitions of the Golden Nica at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz and the collaborations with Dumb Type, William Forsythe for Wear, Toyo Ito for Blurring Architecture and with the ex Japan, David Sylvian. In the works of the Japanese artist we live experiences at the limit both from a sensorial and mental point of view, immersed in a long-term program of moving images. Sculptural works of sounds and new media that investigate the abstract visions of reality, that is, the data, today at the basis of interpretation, knowledge and even interaction with the world. In short, at an Ikeda exhibition you observe the multimedia culture of the future, you find yourself catapulted into a new universe in which macrocosm and microcosm coincide and matter is clearly secondary to the laws and visual and sound manifestations of the virtual kingdom of numbers. In his latest creation, datamatics [ver.2.0], this sort of ultra-minimalism finds full expression, thanks to a real-time computation program and a data scan that allows Ikeda to create a new sequence of sounds and images: a further step in the direction of the abstraction of reality compared to the results achieved in the initial work of March 2006. Some are already talking about metadatamatics.
